Sweden in the quest for global talent

Highly skilled workers are central in today’s global knowledge economy, playing a central role in countries’ rigorous pursuit of attracting and retaining highly qualified labor migrants. This becomes particularly important to Sweden, a post-industrial country at the very forefront of technological and digital innovations in the global knowledge economy. In a comparative perspective, our analysis suggests that Sweden constitutes a deviant case with a unique, generalist and employer-driven policy regime, without specific targeting of highly skilled migrants. In a comparative policy perspective, this deviance is arguably problematic in the context of existing matching problems on the Swedish labor market, and are further assessed in terms of recent policy changes aimed at enhancing Swedish attractiveness for highly skilled labor migrants.